English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout

Key Takeaways

Okay, welcome everyone to today's Google Web Master Central office hours hangouts. Uh, my name is John Mueller. I'm a web master trends analyst here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do is talk with web masters and publishers about websites and web search issues that they might have. Um, looks like we have a nice crowd again today. Uh, lots of questions that were submitted as well. Um, as always, I'll give a chance to to any of the new faces here in the hangout to ask the first questions. If nobody new wants to ask a question, I got one. All right. Uh, basically, I just had a question regarding the mobile friendly test. Um, I've noticed something that uh as we strive to make sure we're doing everything uh properly and have all of our technical ducks in a row. Um, the mobile friendly test seems to whenever we test a page like tomorrow I can do it test one page it'll fail the test the first time. Then if I just go and test another page on our site it'll pass. And then if I go back to the first page that one will pass. And this is pretty repeatable. So was a little concerned that it might be something that we're doing wrong or possibly there's a bug in the test. I'm not aware of any bug in the in the test. So that leaves the other option open. Um I I don't know. It probably depends a bit on what what you see in the screenshot there. What what I could imagine is that maybe we're having trouble fetching some of the JavaScript or CSS files from your server. Maybe something is is timing out there sometimes and that causes us to be able to fetch the main page, but not like all of the styling and JavaScript information. So, we might not be able to pass that through. And these are files that usually we can cache on our side. So, once we've been able to fetch them, we can probably just reuse the the previously fetched version. So that might be something that you're seeing there where um if for example we we kind of time out on some of these things you should see that in search console as well. Uh then that's something that that might be happening there. Um with regards to timing out you could double check your server to make sure that it's really not an issue on your server that it's really kind of like more like a timing issue there that Google just didn't have enough bandwidth available for your site at the moment. uh you can make sure that it's uh responding as quickly as possible to these requests uh that the pages have minimal amount of embedded JavaScript and CSS files so that we don't have to do hundreds of requests just to render one page. So those are kind of the the standard things I'd watch out for. I wouldn't see this as a critical issue, but I would see it as something where if you have a bit of time, it's probably worth digging in to figure out what's happening there because maybe users see this this kind of timing out or slowness as well. Okay. Yeah. Because definitely uh when it fails it the screenshot doesn't show the mobile site, but yet in web master tools whenever we do the fetch as Google as mobile that always that always shows the mobile site properly. So, it seems to only be an issue when we run the the mobile friendly test. So, um you can pro I I don't know if if in this case it would work, but sometimes you'll see individual resources that weren't able to be fetched and you can kind of like click on that uh expando icon to to get a list of those resources and you could probably double check there to see if there's anything that's continuously showing up there in that test. Okay, thank you. We'll look into that. Thanks. Sure. Did I miss the window for you guys to ask questions? Go for it. Um, I work on a site with a huge uh navigation menu and uh so I I've read lots of stuff about no following internal links and never no follow internal links. I was wondering if there's circumstances when no following may be a good idea. So, I'm just thinking of Google bot crawling the site and a page where the navigation may not be actually relevant to the user, but it just lives there and it's the first thing the bot gets to. So, how much uh use is that to users? How much am I steering them in the wrong direction? I usually wouldn't worry too much about that. That's something where we can recognize the navigation fairly easily and we can still crawl the site normally. Uh kind of recognizing the structure within the website as well. So unless your navigation has like thousands of links in there, then that's something I I wouldn't really worry about. If it does have thousands of links in there, then that's probably more of a usability issue anyway. I'm working on that. Okay. But if you're looking at something, I don't know, I just say like hundreds of links, something around that that order of magnitude, then that's something we we should be able to deal with. That's not something where you need to artificially tweak the navigation to kind of make it disappear for Google bot. Okay. Thanks. Hey John, I have one. Sure. Go for it. So, it's interesting. I'm working on a site that's a industry leader, you know, uh market leader in their in their field. They have a thousand employees. Uh good company. No ranking penalties or any specific spammy stuff that they did in the past. But for their main keyword, their one product, they don't rank anywhere. Uh in the US, um but in the Netherlands, in the UK, all the other engines, they're, you know, pretty well ranking on the first or second page, but in the US in their market, they have absolutely no rankings for their main keyword for everything else. They're doing fine first page, featured snippets, knowledge graph, everything. But there, it seems like there's one keyword phrase that they're absolutely, you know, hit on. I don't know if it's a penguin thing or if you ever seen anything like that, but only in one country. Um, that's probably hard to diagnose like like in a hangout like this. I I'd probably need that example. So, if if you can send that to me by email or just a private note on Google+, then that would be interesting to look at. I can't guarantee that we can like tweak that and fix that, but definitely show it show it to the team and see what what they think and kind of figure out if there's something on our side or if they think well the algorithms are actually treating it correctly in this case because there's something weird unexpected happening that might not be visible directly. Yeah, I'll do that. I think the team was at SMX uh advance and but they didn't get a chance to ask Gary. So, I'll I'll send that to you and that would be awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, sure. Glad to take a look. All right. Um, let me start off with some of the submitted questions and if there are more questions from you all in between, feel free to jump on in. Um, let's see. Starting here. Would you agree that the best way to improve the rankings of a landing page would be to have lots of useful content based on a landing page subject and have it internally linked to that landing page from your blog section? If not, what would you do? Um, so in general, if you have a landing page for a specific topic, then having information on that topic definitely makes sense. So that's hard not to to really agree with with regards to linking it internally. If it's an important page, then definitely show that it's important through your internal links as well. So that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be linked from a blog, but it could be from from your homepage, from different parts of your website, depending on where you think it makes sense to kind of find users that are interested in that content and guide them there. Um, I had some pages incorrectly set as 404s and 410s some time ago. If I was to change these back to status code 200 and then 301 them to the current URLs, will Google start passing any page rank to the new pages again or not? Uh, yes. If you change if you kind of recreate pages that were flagged as 40410, then we'll start treating those as normal pages again. So if you put content there then we can start indexing that again especially if we find new links to those pages if you have redirects there then we can start uh passing that page rank on as well. So if you kind of reconsider the decision to remove content completely from your site and you say oh this old URL I want to reuse for the same kind of content again for something else then you can definitely do that. Uh we got an unnatural links penalty two years ago which then changed to impacts links which we successfully recovered from six months ago. However, the SEO agency disavowed almost everything to get rid of the impact links. Can we put some of the good links back? Uh sure. If uh you disavow too much and you disavow things which are actually normal good links, then you can definitely remove those from the disavow file. submit the new file with those links removed and then we'll be able to take those into account again. Uh that's probably not something where you'll see a big change immediately happen, but uh over time as we rec crawl those URLs, we'll be able to take that into account again. In general, while I recommend taking um kind of like a a rough look at your links when it comes to to link penalties, link manual actions, uh I wouldn't recommend removing everything from your site because then you're really removing a lot of things that might be actually kind of beneficial and normal for your website as well. Um how can we reverse the negative impact of a core algorithm update? Do you regularly refresh the site data or do we need another core algorithm update to see positive changes? Uh we drastically improved content quality, user metrics, relevancy, etc. Um five plus months. So in general, we have a lot of algorithms that run all the time that uh run from time to time as well. And these are things that do look at your website overall. So if you're working on improving your website overall, then that's something that these algorithms will probably take into account. It's not something where there's like a line of HTML that you need to tweak and then suddenly the ranking algorithms will see the site differently. Usually it's really the the bigger picture that these algorithms are looking at. Uh we have separate branch pages for each of our depots. uh should we be internally linking these to our category pages where we offer that service to enforce that we offer that service in that area or does Google or is Google able to to know that already what do you recommend? Um this is mostly up to you. So if you have separate pages for individual locations and you have list of the services and the products that you offer in those locations and you think users going to those location pages would profit from kind of having this this uh kind of lookup into the different products and services you have, then sure, go ahead and and put that in there. However, if you're only doing that because you think you're passing page rank to the right pages, then probably that's the wrong motivation for something like this. I'd really look at it from a user point of view. Are users going to these pages? Are they finding useful information already on these pages such as address, uh, opening hours, phone number, uh, those kind of things? Um, and do they need additional information such as links to the rest of your content? Then obviously put that in there. A lot of websites have that already naturally because they kind of have that in their navigation anyway where you have the different locations and then maybe sections of your site for the individual products and services that you offer. Um, how does Google treat landing pages that are not accessible from your website? We've seen some competitors create these and they seem to rank well, but you can't access the pages directly from the website. is a class as a gateway page. Um, so we wouldn't necessarily classify those as as being spammy pages, but what will happen there is that if we can't crawl to those pages, then we'll have a lot of trouble understanding the context of those pages. We'll have difficulty actually finding those pages in the first place, uh, discovering them so that we can crawl them for the first time, that we can index them, that we can show them in search. So, if these are pages that are really completely separate from the rest of your website, then it's probably going to be hard for us to to pick up the the right context there and to show them in the in the search results appropriately. So, ideally, I'd recommend making sure that any page within your website can be crawled from any other page so that users can kind of follow a trail of links to that page, but also search engines can do that. Uh, does the HTTPS ranking boost differ depending on the type of site that you have? For example, would it be more important for e-commerce sites that deal with financial transactions as opposed to a blog? Uh, can you negatively be affected by not doing it? Uh, no. The HTTPS ranking boost is not dependent on the type of site that you have. Uh, so that could be relevant for pretty much anything. However, keep in mind that this ranking boost is not something that will propel you from page 10 to page one. It's more of a subtle thing, more like a tiebreaker that when we know that URLs are essentially equivalent, we'll prefer the HTTPS version. So that's something to to kind of keep in mind to keep uh the expectations in check to make sure that uh when you're working on this with uh the rest of your website with the rest of your company, you're not suggesting that switching to HTTPS will make your website rank number one automatically. Uh in our blog section, does the value of an article diminish depending on the number of internal anchor links it has going out from it? Uh, we're told that we should have two, one of which is optimized, one to a category, one to a product. What do you think? Um, no. The value of an article doesn't diminish if you have outbound links on a page. It's uh gives more value, I think, to the user. It's not something that we take into account from an SEO point of view directly. But if it provides more value to the user by having more references within your website, outside of your website, then that's something that probably makes sense for a page. Uh, with regards to one of those links should be optimized or not, that's really up to you. So, we use these links for discovering new URLs, for understanding the context of URLs within your website, outside of your website as well. Uh, so if you use an appropriate anchor text, that always helps us there. It's not the case that you need to stuff keywords into those anchor text, but just kind of like use something other than click here and link here to the other page so that we can actually get some context from that link. Now, John, quickly regarding blogs, does the algorithm attempt to identify what section of a website might be a blog and treat it any differently than any other page? uh not necessarily. So there are some aspects that could come into play there uh with regards to like using RSS feeds to actually update the content directly so that we can kind of pick up the changes a little bit faster. Uh with regards to kind of like finding dates on the content that we can understand, oh this is new and relevant content or this is kind of like evergreen content that's always relevant. Those kind of things. But it's not the case that we have something that says, "Oh, this URL is on a blog. Therefore, it should be treated differently." It's just, well, for this URL, we have this metadata available. Uh, for that URL, we have different metadata available. We need to find the the right one to show in rankings. And as far as dates go, would you recommend not having dates on like the evergreen type content as you called it? That's kind of up to you. I I think sometimes that does make sense. Sometimes it's it's not something that you necessarily need to have there. Um, from a personal point of view, if you have a blog, then I definitely put dates on there because when people stumble across that a year later or two years later, they'd like to know how relevant this this information is. Maybe it's really new and they should be giving a lot more weight. Or maybe they should be saying, "Well, this was published 10 years ago and it's on this topic where lots of things have changed. In the meantime, maybe it's not so relevant for me, but at least from a user point of view, I think having dates on there makes a big difference. John, talking about stuff that changed, Gary posted this morning on Twitter that 30 times redirects don't lose page rank anymore. Do you know if that's a joke or if it's a new change to Google bot crawling? Could you talk about that a little bit? Post the link. Three times. It's uh 308. So any type of three is redirect. Like I thought he was talking about like how many hops you have. I'm sorry. No, I I think 30 times would be a little excessive. Yeah. Yeah. 301 redirects don't lose page rank anymore. Yes. That used to lose page rank. I mean I know there's a little bit of a debate um going on with you. I I think that well that that's something that we had like way in the beginning where we saw a lot of people doing spammy stuff with redirects then that that definitely made sense there. But uh at the moment if you have a 301 redirect 302 redirect 30 whatever redirect then those wouldn't uh lose page rank. So this is something that I think came up in one of the questions here as well. It's like I move to HTTPS. Is the ranking boost kind of comparable to the drop I have with a 301 redirect? And uh since there is no drop with a 301 redirect, that's that's not something you need to worry about. But I'm trying to say is that like new as of like the next past week or so, or it's been like this for some time? That's been a while. All right. Thank you. Um, how long does it take for Google to build up trust again in a site after a manual links penalty? Would you say two years is about right to see a recovery if we've been doing everything else good in the meantime? Um, it kind of depends on what all has happened in in the meantime, what what kind of um issues you've been seeing there. So some algorithms do take quite a bit of time to refresh and that might be something that's playing a role here. If it's a matter of just a manual action, then as soon as that reconsideration request is reprocessed, then essentially that manual action is lifted and your site is kind of in in the normal rankings again. So that's something where it really kind of depends on what all has been happening with that site with search in general. Uh would you say that the more that the more external links to different domains the page has the more unique detailed and valuable content should be on that page otherwise that page might trigger some kind of lowquality or demotion algorithm? Uh not necessarily. So just putting external links on a page doesn't necessarily make it better. Uh sometimes it does provide more additional information but it's not having external links on its own will kind of improve the quality of a page. Uh scraper sites ranking above me with my own content since January. Does my domain have irreversible quality issues? Even my eight-year-old updated pages are outranked by other sites. Uh there exact copies with tons of ad banners and no extras. Is this permanent? Uh that sounds like something we might want to pass on to the engineering team. So if you listening if you can send me some uh information on Google+ for example uh with queries with URLs and that might be useful to to pass on uh so that we can kind of take a look and see if that's working as expected or something weird is happening on our site. Uh I have a product review page with a link to an official site. official site ranks first for the product query where users can complete the transaction. Uh, does this link hurt me though it helps to complete the user journey on a different domain and ends a search session? Um, product review page with a link to an official site. Um, that sounds kind of like an affiliate site uh kind of setup where you have one page and you're linking with an affiliate link to another page where the transaction can actually be done. In general, just by having that kind of configuration is not going to cause any problems. So, Google is not against affiliate kind of businesses. Uh, that's not a problem. However, we do expect that these pages have unique, compelling, and valuable content of their own. So, that's something where if you're an in in the affiliate business and you're reselling products or kind of linking to other places where people can buy those products, you need to make sure that your pages can stand on their own, that there's actually reason why we should show your pages in search results rather than any of the other ones. So, if you're just taking an affiliate feed and republishing it on your site, then that's not a lot of additional value that you provide there. Whereas, if you're really doing an in-depth review and you're linking to another place where you can actually buy that product, then that sounds like a a good uh use of a website and that sounds like something we would generally be interested in showing in search. Uh we have an external link going out to the third party review site that we use. Should this uh be followed or no followed link? Um in general, that's that's up to you. So, I don't see just off the hand see any reason why this would necessarily need to be no follow link. Um, sometimes you put those reviews on a third party site. Sometimes you you keep those reviews on your own site. Um, in general, that's not something where I necessarily know follow that. But it might be interesting to see some examples. So, if you have some uh that you've seen externally where you think, well, this is kind of a weird situation, um maybe post those in the help forum and uh we can take a look there. Um how much should I care about updating incoming links after changing domains? A website that has natural links from a lot of domains change the domain. All links are redirected with 301. Should we expect any search results visibility boost after updating the links? Um, in general, this is something that just makes it easier for users to actually find your content. And, uh, if over time you're kind of collecting this crust of redirect chains from one domain to another, uh, then that's something that's probably worth cleaning up at some point. So, we we do recommend updating the the links from external sites to point to your new domain. uh that does help us to kind of reinforce that this is a permanent move and you're really moving to this domain and we should really switch our URLs that we have indexed from the old version to the new version. So all of these things kind of add up. I don't think you'd see any critical loss by not doing this, but I'd really kind of look into your analytics and see where most of the users are coming from and make sure that they don't have to be bounced through this additional redirect, which means another DNS lookup and all of that. Um, I have a page that reviews 10 products and it ranks okay with no links from that page. Uh when I add 10 external links from this page where users can get those product, the page loses 70% of the search traffic. Uh when I remove them, it comes back. What's happening? I don't know. I'd have to take a look at those pages to actually see what what you're actually doing there. What what's happening there? So, it's really hard to say just uh from a vague description like this. Uh you can obviously send me that information by by Google+ if you want or maybe post in the help forum so that others can also take a look at that. Here's that John would it be possible that by providing links to his competitors he's boosting his competitors and pushing himself down the down the rankings possibly. possibly. But I not 70 places I wouldn't imagine, but yeah, I mean 70 places is is kind of a big change. Um it might be lots of other things. It might be coincidential timing. Uh it's it's really hard to say what what might be happening. Here's that uh question about HTTPS. Uh, does the ranking boost from moving to HTTPS equal the loss that you get from having 301 redirects or is the loss still greater than the boost? Um, what's up with that? So, like like Barry mentioned, Gary tweeted that there is no loss uh with regards to 301 redirects with regards to other 302 redirects either. So, that's something where you can definitely do that regardless of the redirects. However, like like I mentioned before, the caveat that uh moving to HTTPS is not going to make your site rank number one automatically. It's more of a tiebreaker. It's a it's a fairly small ranking signal. John, does it does this mean that some people in the last few months would have received a a boost with no way of tracking where that came from? Because it used to be, and we've spoken about this before, that 301's didn't pass all of the the value, but now if it does, will that have some people have just suddenly gone, "Oh, look, I suddenly probably not noticed it." Probably not something where where you really notice that in traffic, right? because we've had whole domains redirected to another as you know. So, but we didn't see any real movement over the last six months if it was within the last six. Yeah. Um, we fixed a schema markup error on our products two months ago and search console is still only showing a very gradual decline in errors at as the bot recalls them. At this rate, it'll take a year or more to sort out. How can we speed that up? Um, one thing you can do there is submit a new sitemap file and let us know that all of these pages have changed. So in the sitemap file, you can specify last modification date and that's useful for us to to recognize that these pages have actually recently changed. So that's that's one thing you can do there. In general, however, you will always kind of have this uh gradual decline in errors when you make significant changes on your website because rec crawling and re-indexing is is a gradual process. We can't rec crawl the whole website from one day to the next, at least for for any kind of larger website. So, that's something where you'll always kind of see this gradual change over time um when you make changes. That could be fixing errors in the structured data markup. uh fixing errors on AMP pages or fixing crawl errors in general, you'll always kind of see this gradual change over time. Uh we were asked in search console to select the type of industry our site is in. Does this affect the rankings in any way if we either leave it blank or select the wrong one from the list? Um I'm not actually aware of us uh asking for the type of industry in search console. I believe if you sign up for Bing web master tools, they ask for this kind of information, but I don't know if we actually do that in in Google Search Console. But regardless if we did ask for this information, it would be purely for statistical purposes and not for any kind of ranking information. So if you pick the wrong one there or if you don't have one that really matches, then that wouldn't play a role. Uh, who's the best representative to check to chat about Chromium devs dropping support for HTTP2 in Chrome 51 back in May, the reasons behind that decision and HTTP2 and ALPN in general. I have no idea. Probably someone on the Chrome team would be able to help there. Um, I believe the the Chrome developers are active on Stack Exchange. Not completely sure. So that might be one place uh to kind of check in with them to to see what specifically is happening there. I'm not aware of this particular change and what might behind that. Uh sometimes I see that almost every page on my domain gets a boost in search traffic for one to five days. I see gradual rise but then it drops and stays the same for three or more weeks. Does this mean that the overall sitewide quality is not enough? uh what can I do? Um it's really hard to say without actually having any uh information about the site and what actually is happening there. So I don't really have anything specific that I can say there. It can definitely happen that our algorithms kind of rethink things from time to time. You see some pages go up, some pages go down. Uh those kind of changes kind of happen naturally. If you see your site sometimes ranking a little bit better, sometimes ranking a little bit less, it might be that you're just kind of on on the the edge there for with regards to our algorithms and kind of like pushing it significantly in a positive direction will kind of keep you above that edge. Uh but in general, that's not something where we'd have any specific guidance on like what specifically you need to change within your website. You really kind of need to take a step back and look at your site overall. Uh, I saw a spike in search traffic to one of my pages for two days, but it dropped to the same level as before. There was no increase in search volume for those keywords. Uh, was Google testing quality of my page and deemed it not worthy of more traffic. Um, kind of again as as like with the previous questions, sometimes our algorithms review a site and they think, well, it's fantastic. And the next day they look at it and say, well, maybe it's not as good as I thought it was. and they kind of move it down again. So these kind of changes can happen over time. H it's pretty normal that you see changes in search. We're always improving our algorithms to figure out how to to best put them together. The rest of the web is also changing all the time. So you're kind of seeing fluctuations in search and that's kind of normal. Uh how important are XML sitemaps these days? Our site has been around for 20 years. Google sends good amount of traffic to many pages. Is it worth the effort to update the sitemaps? So sitemaps are fantastic if you have new or updated content within your website that you need to have crawled and index fairly quickly because with with the change date in particular, we can pick that up fairly quickly, crawl and index those updated pages and take that into account for search. If your pages haven't changed a lot recently or aren't changing that regularly, then probably we can just live with the version that we have indexed already. So, it kind of depends on your website. I think if you've had the same website for the past 20 years and probably it's worth kind of revisiting and making some changes and updating things over time. Uh, but in general, we try to recognize the changes primarily. Uh sitemap can also help if you're not just changing the content but if you're changing something technical on the site. So if you're adding things like atraflang markup real canonicals if you're adding alternate mobile versions if you're adding uh AMP links from those pages then all of these things mean that those URLs have changed and that we should go off and rec crawl and reprocess them. So, it's not just the text that needs to kind of that could be changing where it makes sense to put a sitemap, but anything on those pages that you want Google to take into account. Uh, Google shows one of my URLs which I didn't focus on, for example. example.com/keyword as my URL, but Google takes dubdubdubample.comkey-word and more as the URL. So, the second one is older, but is there any way to show my supposed URL? So, assume you have two URLs that kind of have the same content or maybe even identical content. uh then there are a number of ways that you can use canonicalization as we call it to let us know about which one you want to have indexed. So that could be something like a redirect. If you redirect from one version to the other, we'll probably assume that the redirection target is is something that you want to have indexed. If it's a 301 redirect, you can use a real canonical to let us know that this is your preferred version. Uh you can update the internal links within your website to make sure that they're all pointing at the version that you want to have indexed. Uh you can do things like sitemaps for example as well that let us know this is actually the version that you do want to have indexed. So all of these things kind of add up and if we have two versions that we know are essentially equivalent and all of the signals are saying well this is the one that you should be showing in search then we'll try to follow that. It's not guaranteed, however, and especially if there are mixed signals. If you're saying, well, this is the canonical, but you're redirecting to the other one, or this is the canonical, but all the internal links are going to the other one. Then that's the type of situation where we have to make a decision. And our algorithms might say, well, this is a good choice today, and tomorrow they look at it and say, oh, well, actually, these other signals are pretty good, too. We'll just pick that one instead. So, the clearer you can give us your information, the more likely we'll be able to take it into account. Uh, does HTML 5 have a positive effect in SEO? No. Um, HTML 5 can be really useful to make a modern website, but it's not something that we'd use on its own as a ranking factor. Uh, many descriptions use emojis or symbols as eyecatchers. how tolerant is Google. As far as I know, such descriptions are not conformed to the guidelines. So, we generally try to filter those out in the snippets, but it's not the case that we would demote a website or kind of flag it as web spam if it has emojis or other signals in the description. Uh, a site has two topics. One topic has a 100 highquality pages. The other has 25,000 hight traffic pages with AdSense. Uh we can't get the 100 pages without AdSense to rank well. They used to rank well. Uh what might be causing this? The hightraffic pages are on a subdomain. Um really hard to say what what might be happening there. In general, when we look at a site, we do try to look at it overall. So that's something where maybe those those other pages are kind of pulling down the the rest of the site. Uh so in general, I'd really work to make sure that the across the site everything is really high quality and valuable. Um how important is it to display the same content on desktop and mobile versions of a page? Can some content mismatch cause some kind of confusion for Google bot or worse ranking? uh for example mismatch in number of displayed articles or products. Um we we do expect that these pages are equivalent. So that means that when a user clicks on a search result, if they go to the desktop version or the mobile version, they should be able to fulfill kind of what you you were suggesting in that search result. So that doesn't mean that they have to be identical. It doesn't mean that they have to use the same layout and the same kind of like sidebar navigation and everything. It essentially just means that they have to fulfill the same purpose and be equivalent for the user. So if uh those pages have if it's for example a list of different products on your page and the mobile version has 10 and the desktop version has 20 in the list then that's still a list of those products and you can still kind of go through that and find all of that. On the other hand, if uh the desktop version is a list of products and the mobile version is just one product then that's kind of a weird mismatch there. So that's something where we kind of expect them to be equivalent. I don't think you'd see a ranking drop at the moment because we essentially try to recognize the mobile version and fold it together with the the desktop version, but it's it's possible over time that we'll say, well, actually the mobile versions are the ones that we want to focus on. And then you might see a change in the search results. Also related to the mobile version, in order to get our site to look the best in responsive design both for desktop and mobile with regards to navigation in our code, we basically have our whole navigation code repeated and one displays when it's mobile and one displays when it's desktop. Just wanted to make sure that that wouldn't be an issue that it sees all these navigation links repeated twice in the same area of the code. That should be fine. I I wouldn't worry about that. Okay, thanks. Can you guys confirm whether you will be rolling out the penguin update or not? In a yes or no answer, uh, yes, we will be rolling one out. I guess that's good. Um, I don't have any date or time frame on that. So that's still kind of not not a perfect answer for you all, I know, but uh we we are definitely working on that. So I I don't want to jinx it, so I won't say anything more. Um you were about to say something. Just saying. Nobody's listening. No. Um different topic. uh the IP host location of domain domain does that have an effect on the SEO? No. So well mostly no. So I I think this is talking about the server location in general. Uh we use a number of factors when it comes to geo targeting for recognizing which audience that you're talking to. And if we don't have any additional information, we will use a server location. But in general we'll have information such from your domain name where you maybe have a country code tople domain or if you have a generic tople domain you'll have geo targeting set or you'll have atref lang information in your website then all of these kind of help us to understand which which area of the world which country are you targeting. So in general we we have enough information to actually figure out which country you're targeting. uh in a case where it's a completely new website and we have absolutely no idea what this website is about and we know the server is located in one country then that's something we might take into account but as soon as we have more information then usually that overrides the server location completely uh we're working with the lottery in the UK Google is creating an answer result for Euromillions results it pulls in numbers that were drawn however it doesn't pull the latest result. How can we make Google pull the correct information from our page? Um, I took a quick look at this uh and passed it on to to the team here. Uh, it looks like it's pulling essentially a snippet from that web page. And obviously snippets from web pages, they take some time to be reprocessed, crawled, and and reindexed. So, it looks like we're kind of pulling in an older version uh of the content than you would actually have on the page there. So one thing you can obviously do is let us know that these pages changed faster. So using something like a sitemap file would definitely help us there so that we understand well this page that we crawled yesterday has actually changed in the meantime and we should go off and rec crawl and reindex that new page. So that would help. Uh but I'm also pass it on to the team to kind of make sure that we're not pulling it out as something uh like a bigger snippet on a page. Uh we use structured data markup to display breadcrumb in the search results. Sometimes the breadcrumb is displayed properly. Uh other times it's just a cropped URL even though it's exact page type. What can we do? Um I probably need to to have some example queries and URLs there to to kind of see what what is happening there. Why we're sometimes picking up the structured markup. why we're sometimes not using that that information. Okay. Should I send you some uh URLs then? Okay. Some examples. All right. Thank you. So, I I need some URLs uh from your site and some queries that are showing those results. Okay. Well, the weird thing is that like whenever I I search for the wrong like if I misspell the query, the right markup shows up and if I if I type what we actually want to rank for, uh it doesn't work sometimes. So, it' be good to fix that. Okay. That sounds weird. Yeah. All right. I'll I'll see you. That's That sounds like a perfect thing to pass on to the team. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. Um, is a no follow an effective and efficient way to sculpt linked and authority flow for internal links? Uh, for example, pages and sites with large navigation menus to pages which might not always be relevant to the user. Uh, in general, I'd recommend not using no follow as a way to kind of sculpt page rank because that probably doesn't do what you expect it to do. Uh, I think using no follow internally makes sense for things like calendar sections where you have kind of an infinite calendar otherwise. Uh, but in general for a normal website, you don't need to use no follow to sculpt page rank. We can pretty much figure that out on ourselves. And even with a no follow there, it's not going to change anything. Um, a week ago my review snippets disappeared for all pages older than four days. After that, if a page becomes older than four days, they also disappear. Uh, I have a lot of reviews with 2,000word unique content and the technical part is okay. Uh, what could be the case? Really hard to say because it sounds like technically we're able to pick it up. from a policy point of view, our algorithms kind of agree that it's okay to show. Uh so that's probably something where we'd also want to take a look at that. So if you can send that to me directly by Google+, for example, or you can also post in the help forum, um that's something that would be really interesting for us to kind of look at and see is this really working the way that we expect it to work. Uh we used to have other ad networks together with AdSense between um some of these dates. So 2005 2016 some banners had deceptive download buttons. Safe browsing marked our site as unsafe for two days and we immediately removed the ads may be the reason for lost rankings. Um probably not. So, as far as I know, the the safe browsing uh evaluations that we do specifically for Chrome are things that we do specifically just for Chrome. They don't uh apply to any of the search ranking issues. However, it might be that of course other things are are in play there. If you're a site that used to have deceptive download buttons, then maybe there are other things that our web spam algorithms picked up on and kind of are responding to now. Uh but that wouldn't be from what the safe browsing side kind of flags. Even in situations where you have malware on a site, then that's something where we'd essentially be ranking the site in the same place. We just be showing the man malware interstitial there. It's not that we would demote a site from the search results because of malware. But again, there might be various things coming into play there. Um, can you talk about plans to expand the data in search analytics? For example, being able to differentiate local search from organic search images, voice search, combinations of knowledge graph results, and how often they're displayed. Um, I try not to pronounce things, so I don't really know what uh what I can say for for this specifically. I know the team is working on search analytics and working on expanding that but it's it's always uh kind of an interplay between different sides uh when it comes to to bringing out features like this. So in an ideal situation uh what's important for us is on the one hand that this is data that makes sense uh for us to kind of expose externally so it doesn't cause any harm on our side but also that we see that this data helps you to make even better web content. So the more we can go to the internal teams and say if we provided web masters with this type of content they'd be able to make even better websites and our users would uh search more on Google then that's a really strong argument to bring up. On the other hand if we just say well some SEOs really want this information they don't really know what to do with it but they like to track numbers and uh they want to have those kind of numbers as well. then that's not a really strong argument to the team because then they say well what use is it if we provide these numbers if we do all of this work to expose those metrics if nothing actually changes on the web. So if you have things where you see well if Google would be able to provide this information then we could significantly improve this part of the web then that's kind of useful feedback to have and that's something that we can take back to the team and say hey look at this awesome feedback I totally agree with um this person who put this together uh that we could improve the rest of the web if we provided this additional information in search console. So that's that kind of feedback would be really useful. Uh can you talk about how you treat subdomains? We have five similar topics but different enough that we would put them in separate folders. Uh instead we use subdomains as he hurt us in rankings. No, not in general. So, we recognize that some sites use subdomains as different parts of the site and in the same way that other sites might use subdirectories. Uh, with subdomains, the main thing I'd watch out for is that you're not using wildcard subdomains because that can make crawling really, really hard if we have to like go through all of these subdomains and treat them all as separate hosts. Um, but if you have a limited number of subdomains, then that that might be an option. Uh similarly if you have different sites that are essentially completely separate websites but they're in subdirectories so in folders then we'll try to figure that out as well and say well actually these are all on the same domain on the same host name but these are maybe user generated content like separate sites that should be treated completely separately then we'll try to figure that out as well. So that's not something that would kind of like improve or hurt rankings. It's more a matter of us figuring that out. And so far, I've seen our algorithms do a pretty good job of that. Um, let me grab one more question here. I run scrubshopper.com. We recently upgraded the site significantly, but this required changing the URL structure. We've implemented hundreds of 301 redirects. Our organic traffic from Google has dropped to zero. Uh, do we have some sort of penalty on our domain? Um, if there were manual action, you'd see that in search console in the manual action section. Otherwise, what might just be happening is that we're having trouble following all of these redirects. So, I'd look at the technical side of things to make sure that we can actually pick those redirects up, that you don't have things like uh no index in there in the mix as well, or that you're using robots text to block some of these URLs, uh, those kind of things. So if you're in kind of from a technical point of view handling everything right then it might also be that this is just a natural change uh for your website in search that would have happened independent onlyly of any URL structure change. However, anytime you do make significant URL structure changes it is going to take quite some time for Google to kind of understand that again. So that's something where you probably want to be looking at a couple weeks, maybe even a couple of months time for things to settle down before making a decision saying, "Well, this was a good move or this was a bad move." But, uh, again, that's that's something that just takes a bit of time to kind of settle down properly. All right, couple of minutes left. What else is is on your mind? Hey, John. Hi. Hi, I was wondering uh if it's ever going to be possible to do a whole TLDD disavow. What would you be using that for? Like we get a lot of spammy links from other countries um listed on websites that have nothing to do with what we're selling. um a lot of porn site and things like that. Um I don't know. I I think it might be possible that it's already possible to do that, but in general, I wouldn't recommend going that broad because you're probably, I don't know, potentially dropping a lot of reasonable stuff as well. Uh but that's interesting feedback to get. Yeah, maybe we need to find a different way of of handling that kind of situation. Thank you. More questions. What's on your mind? One more question. Okay. Um, is there something going on with the data highlighter tool in the web master search console? uh because every time uh we use it to uh highlight certain things on our website and uh we're using the feature where you highlight um multiple pages using using the same tags. Um it does however time to time uh start showing errors where it's highlighting the wrong items. Uh when I go to click on it, it doesn't load. It shows that there was some sort of an error that had occurred and it takes like up to like couple of hours just to load that particular page to fix the highlighted data. And when we do fix it uh and click done, um it takes then another 15 to 20 minutes for it to register. I don't know. I I know they they did some maintenance on that a while back, but that sounds like a more systemic issue that you're seeing there. So, I have to take a look at that with the the data highlighter team. And that's something that you can reproduce regularly or does that just happen, I don't know, every couple of weeks? Uh, this has been going on for approximately, I would say, about two to three months. Okay. and it happens just about every day. Okay, that doesn't sound that great. Yeah. Um I I need to double check with the highlighter team on that. All right, thank you. Hey, John. Um one other question. And um there's certain queries uh for our site where if we put in kind of like a a short search term, a very short tail term will rank in a given position. And then if we take that same query and add into it car, which is what our site is related to, um which should make it more relevant, the ranking will drop sometimes significantly. Do you have any uh thoughts on what may cause that? Um what we might be able to do about it? Um hard to say. Um one of the things that I I don't know it it really be something where we'd have to look at the the specific examples. So, one of the things that might be happening is that we're looking for that specific phrase with those extra keywords and that might not be a perfect match if it's a if it's kind of like a combination of keywords rather than a real phrase from your website. So, that that might be something that that's happening there. Um, but it's it's really hard to say without having like the the full example queries and be able to kind of reproduce that on our side. Okay. I'll I'll send you a couple queries. Thanks. Sure. All right. Uh so I need to head off to another meeting. Um but it's been great talking with you all again. Um I set up I think the next hangout on Friday and uh I'll try to set up another earlier one as well for those of you from Australia and Japan that that part of the world. Um, thank you all for joining. Thanks for all of the questions and uh hope to see you all again in one of the future hangouts. Bye everyone. Cool. Thanks, John. Thanks, John. See you.